The bully in your office

I once reported to a CEO whom I considered a friend. But circumstances intruded that impacted our relationship. Our subsidiary came under the direction of a new executive, somebody who had been a mentor of mine but didn’t know my boss.

Their first get-together was planned at a rustic retreat over a weekend, with our entire executive team in attendance. My boss told me to bring a sleeping bag and expect to sleep on the floor. I resisted. I mentioned my bad back. I suggested that I could commute each day to the retreat. The next thing I knew, I was pushed against the wall. My CEO, red-faced, was screaming at me about how I was undermining him, going around his back to his new boss. I don’t believe I gave him a reason to believe any of this, but he felt threatened, and the big guy got physical.

I never said a word about the incident to him, HR or anybody else in the office. I just started counting down the days before my next assignment would start. And so did he, reminding me repeatedly in front of my peers that I would not be around to see an initiative through, or that the “office spy” would be gone in a matter of months.

Physical bullying is pretty rare in the corporate world. But the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute published the results of a study in 2017 that showed just how commonplace bullying is. Here are some highlights:

61% of Americans have been bullied in the workplace, have witnessed bullying there or are aware of it.
61% of bullies are bosses.
Women are more often bullied than men; Hispanics are more often bullied than other ethnic groups.
45% of Americans believe companies, informed of a bullying boss, won’t do anything about it.
39% of targets of bullying suffer anxiety, panic attacks or depression.
29% of bullied employees never say anything about their experience, and 65% leave their companies.

Roots

At its roots, bullying is about how and why power is applied. In physics, power is a measure of energy transfer. In organizations, power is the ability to direct people’s energy to cause change. Nothing gets accomplished without the use of power. In companies, people are granted power typically because of their expertise, accomplishments, tenure, position in the hierarchy, connections, etc.

What people do with their power can vary. We hope it might be with an objective of accomplishing something good for the organization. But power can also be used for the benefit of that person in power. And when the objective is to accrue more power, when the balance of power in a relationship is made even more uneven, bad stuff happens.

The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) defines bullying at work as “repeated, health-harming mistreatment of a person by one or more perpetrators. It is abusive conduct that is threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or work interference or sabotage which prevents work from getting done, or verbal abuse.”

Workplace bullying is often in the form of intimidation, insults, being ignored or talked over in meetings, having your mistakes publicized, your efforts undermined or credit for your achievements attributed to somebody else. Again, from the WBI, “it is driven by the bully’s … need to control the targeted individual.” The power relationship is unbalanced to begin with, and the person with the power acts to maintain or increase the imbalance.

Robert Sutton, author of The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt notes that the risk of bullying increases as people climb higher in the hierarchy. He points to research showing“that being and feeling powerful provokes people to focus more on their own needs and wants, and to become oblivious to others’ needs and feelings. And as we all know, sh*t rolls downhill.”

Maybe the act of bullying is all about feeling like you have the power, to feel control over another, whether it’s real or not. My CEO worried that the power in our relationship was flipping, and his “flight or fight” response to the threat was to assert physical dominance. I submitted. He was bigger and stronger than I was. And he was my boss. But in the hangover after his action, he must have realized that it made no difference in my relationship with his boss. Maybe he hoped that I was making an implicit concession, that he was coercing me not to take advantage of my close ties with my mentor. Unfortunately, it came at the cost of a previously healthy manager-subordinate relationship.

What to do if you’re bullied

Remember that bullying may not be illegal unless it includes a threat of physical harm (assault or stalking), affects somebody of protected status (discrimination) or creates what a reasonable person would consider a hostile work environment. Taking legal action may require that you file a report within 180 days of an incident, which means making a decision on what to do with some urgency.

A lot of literature talks about the actions employees can take to deal with bullying. Here are steps you can take to avoid remaining a target:

1. Keep your cool. Escalating emotion may temporarily throw a bully off balance, but you risk a crushing reply.
2. Confront the bully with their behavior, explain how it feels on your end and set consequences that compel respect. Fordham organizational psychology professor Paul Baard suggests quickly and directly saying, “I don’t want to be spoken to that way. Cut it out!”

You probably won’t feel comfortable making this a face-to-face conversation, and that’s OK. An email provides both communication and documentation. Be careful to write with an assumption of positive intent: “I am not sure that you meant to be demeaning, but publicly criticizing my work in a rather personal way like you did is not a good way to get my cooperation.” Be prepared for a response that focuses on a difference of opinion on management style rather than an acknowledgement of bullying. You will not likely win in this exchange, but you serve notice.
3. Change the power equation. Make it about more than just about you, because a bully seldom just picks on one person. Bring in others to your side who are having the same issue, multiplying the credibility of your arguments. More risky actions are to ally with somebody who has more power than the bully or, if the bullying regularly occurs in public, to shame the thug publicly for punching down.
4. Eliminate power as the relationship’s defining characteristic. Call out the behavior and refuse to play the game. Suggest a more constructive relationship based on collaboration, or at least that the bully will get a more satisfactory reaction from somebody who doesn’t realize what’s going on.
5. Ignore and deflect. Give no reaction, with the expectation that the bully will lose interest.

It’s not just about you

While the results of these tactics may be stop you from being bullied, they are not likely to end the bully’s behavior. He or she will probably just move on to somebody else. Trying to end the bullying behavior takes a different approach.

1. Build a case. Just like James Comey reported, take contemporaneous notes and keep them in a journal. Here is where the well-timed email about an abusive event is important. Encourage colleagues in the same situation to keep notes, too. A single episode will be dismissed. But notes of repeated misbehavior following attempts by you and others to address it may be too compelling to ignore.
2. Present your documentation and that of colleagues. The question is, “To whom?” HR is the obvious choice, especially if your company has an ombudsman program. But it is not always the best choice. Human Resources has a mandate to protect the employer. Our news is replete with headlines of people in power who have abused their station for years, whose organizations knew about it and turned a blind eye. If your bully is a senior officer, the headwinds you feel are likely felt by HR as well.

WBI’s Gary Namie suggests going to a senior employee who is not the bully’s ally with the business case. An executive’s abusive action is turning four employees into flight risks, increasing absenteeism, impacting productivity and potentially creating a legal liability. All of these have costs to the company which can be estimated. All can go away with acknowledgement of the issue and corrective action.

Don’t settle for, “I’ll look into this.” Get a commitment on what action you can expect. Will somebody talk to the perpetrator? Will they seek a commitment to address behavior? How will you learn about next steps? Are there disciplinary action that could result from repeated abusive behavior? Is there anything that can be done to ensure your job status is unaffected?

And if nothing works?

Attacking bullying, particularly by senior people, is attacking the prevailing power structure. Sometimes, bullying might just have been bad management, where an individual is not aware of how their actions impact others until they are pointed out. Sometimes, bullies are shamed or threatened into changing their ways. But many times, change is not in the cards. What then?

1. Get counsel. Knowing your legal rights is important, not just as a victim of abuse of power but as a potential whistleblower. If you are among the 2/5 of bullied employees who deal with anxiety or panic as a result, talk to a professional.
2. Get out. If you find yourself the object of continued attacks, if your attempts to fix the problem are stonewalled, if you find your physical or emotional health suffering, why stay in this kind of environment? Not all organizations operate like this. Find one where you feel power is used constructively to build positive change for the organization.

Almost any time an executive joins a new company, there is a mandate to change things. CEOs or VPs are seldom told, “Keep us on the same path we’ve been traveling.” Sometimes you hear, “We want you to be a change agent.” Other times it is specific: “We cannot continue to lose share on the most important part of our portfolio!” Sometimes, it’s just implied, like when a person with a strong sales background takes over for somebody with an operations bent.

There is an interesting rationale to hiring you to a senior position. My friend Richard Henry, President of RAH Content, refers to this as the tyranny of the unknown. Companies will assume that the person on the outside is more capable of implementing needed change than people on the inside. They have an unblemished record. Maybe nobody inside is ready for a senior role. Maybe it is thought that the way things have been done is not a recipe for future success, and that it takes people who have succeeded with another strategy to move the organization ahead. Maybe it that internal people’s growth is not recognized, and they continue to be viewed in the same light as when they were hired.

Here is the truth behind the change you are responsible for implementing… If you are hired into a company as a new executive, you don’t know how ANYTHING gets done in the organization. You don’t know processes. You don’t know culture. You may have a strategy, but in a 2013 Katzenbach Center study, it was shown that 64% of global senior executives saw culture as more critical to the success of change management than strategy or operating model. Maybe you’ll invest time to learn how things work. Maybe you’ll rely on the people who do know how to get things done, as you figure out what to direct them to do.

How, then, can you possibly make change happen quickly? Let me offer five strategies:

1. Plan your work and work your 90-day plan.
Any executive taking on a new role should develop a 90-day plan. Build in your understanding of the company and environment, based on your research. Clarify your vision for success. Lay out what progress can you realistically make in that first quarter. What are the components of your action plan? What resources do you have to draw upon or acquire? What barriers are anticipated, and how can they be overcome? What quick wins can be accomplished, to demonstrate progress and to build relationships?

If you are being recruited for the position, share the plan with colleagues in your last round of interviews. It shows you have taken the job seriously, that you have projected yourself into the role that you seek and that you can show a path to accomplish things.

Why do companies focus on the first 90 days? Because, by Day 90, if there are red flags about you, many people expect they will show up. The honeymoon is over. There can be tangible evidence of your ability to deliver. You have enough exposure within the organization for a consensus about you to begin to form. The first 90 days plan is the equivalent of a coach who scripts out the first ten plays or so in a football game. It doesn’t indicate whether or not you will win, but it does establish the game plan.
A critical component of the 90-day plan is establishing relationships with the people who will help make change happen. Some might be directly involved in implementing the change. Others just have to keep out of the way!

It is unrealistic to accomplish the change you seek to make in 90 days. A company would hire a consultant to do that, not an executive. Accompanying the details of the first 90 days might be extended goals for the significant change you seek.
2. Be ready to scuttle part or all of that plan on Day 1.
You build the plan based on previous experience. But the laws of physics that worked for you in your past life might not hold in the new universe you face. Remember that your plan is a guess at what will work. When you run into the reality of your new situation, you must be quick to adapt. An environment may be more or less responsive to actions than you reckoned. Assumptions of available resources might prove inaccurate. Deadlines might have to change. Process might have to be rewired.

Expectations often change dramatically once you walk in the door. A colleague joined a hotel chain with a brief to introduce brand management throughout the organization. Once employed, he learned that authority from P&L to customer needs was wielded at the unit level. There was no easy short-term way to inject a centralized concept of branding.
3. Get key people onboard.
Medical marketers pay careful attention to key opinion leaders (KOLs), usually physicians whose written or verbal recommendations carry influence with others in their profession. You will find key opinion leaders in your company, and not necessarily where you’d expect when you look at an org chart.

Key opinion leaders often are at the confluence of several groups of interaction. They are hubs of communication. Watch what happens in an audience when a KOL reacts to a leader’s comments. Does the room react to their nods of agreement, crossed arms or rolled eyes? These people are worth cultivating.

Once they are identified, ask KOLs for their opinions. Not only do you get useful feedback, but the KOLs begin to feel invested in your course of action. They feel heard. They can become powerful ambassadors for your initiatives. And it is far more effective to use these people to influence dissenters than, as the new person, to win dissenters over yourself.
4. Tap into legacy.
If you can make a link from where the organization has been to where you are going, it is easier to bring people along. To quote Bruce Weindruch in Start with the Future and Work Back: A Heritage Management Manifesto, “Once you know where you want to go, the value of harnessing your history becomes immeasurable.“

Lots of organizations create awards that reinforce desired performance. A few wise people name these awards after legendary executives in the company’s past. In this way, employees see how somebody long-revered epitomized a particular behavior that is currently valued. People respond positively to a change that is framed as a reversion to core values held since the mythic beginning or in “glory days.”
5. Understand the value of your ignorance.
Being new allows you to ask naïve questions that can cast light on unnecessary paradigms. Why are things done the way they are? Why are these people involved in a process? Is the assessment of risk from an action accurate? Was the way you’ve succeeded in the past ever tried here? In the early days, it is easy to believe that these questions are not asked because you have an agenda, but because you really want to learn how things work.

Being new allows you to break norms. Maybe experiments can be tried that might not be approved otherwise. Maybe shortcuts in process can be explored. Apologies might be required when the rule-breaking becomes apparent. But as former Rear Admiral Grace Hopper said, “It is easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.”

Being new allows you to seek opinions of employees and to aggregate them into arguments for a course of action. In this way, you do not provide your opinion of a direction to be taken, but instead you offer your summation of the experiences and opinions of the organization at large.

Employees will cut you some slack on your ignorance of process, if you can compensate by demonstrating your competence in other areas that matter to them. Use your functional expertise to coach others. Use your management skills to achieve goals through other people.

All well and good so far. But before you climb on board a steamroller and flatten everything in your path, let’s consider four things that can go wrong along the way.

1. Alienation
Leadership determined that your outside experience and competencies are better suited to affect change than the people inside the organization. How does this make those people inside the organization, those whom you will call on to execute your plan, feel? Mainly, that their talents, process, experience or judgment are seen as inferior to your own. That the company doesn’t value how they have been doing something as much as it values the potential of doing things differently.

When you proclaim your change agenda, you are reinforcing these negative feelings from the people on whom you must rely. Diplomacy is critical. Build up their esteem by giving credit to their strengths. Highlight the team’s successes to date and suggest how to invest in their continuation. Underline their critical role going forward. Figure out what’s in it for them, as it relates to the change ahead.

People don’t need to see their input put into action. They just need to feel part of the process. They want to know that theyhave not been ignored. Asking opinions, listening and playing back the feedback you receive can help avoid alienation. Even explaining why somebody’s point of view was not taken forward makes them feel like they are a contributor.
2. Lack of alignment
A former Wells Fargo executive with a strong sales background replaced an Operations person as CEO of a small Upper Midwest bank system. The organization was operationally sound; it needed a stimulus in growing its business. The CEO commuted from one state to another for the job, raising concerns whether he would ever become part of the corporate community. He announced dozens of changes in his first two years – closing kiosks in grocery stores, launching apps, experimenting with video banking, etc. But he observed that the organization, led by long tenured employees, picked and chose which initiative to get behind. They believed they could outlast him. This was infuriating to him. He told a consultant, “I just want to fire all the SOBs!”

The consultant suggested that his company saw so many changes that employees believed he would forget about this month’s program as he initiated next month’s. What was missing was an overarching CHANGE, something that would link all the small changes together. Tell your employees that you are redefining banking convenience and show the link between this and all the steps you take. Or show that you can match the big guys in tech-driven service. If people understand the CHANGE, there is a better chance they’ll sign up for the changes. And if they don’t buy into the CHANGE, they shouldn’t stay with the company.

Alignment can come from clearly articulating a vision, the CHANGE, rather than focusing on the individual changes. Alignment can also be helped through the demonstration of success in the form of quick wins. Celebrate these accomplishments. They may not be strategic, but they build rapport and momentum.
3. Not delivering to expectations
You take on a position with assumptions of what will work. Early days on the job will pressure-test those assumptions. You build a plan preparing for the situation you will face. Plans can change. Even financial goals can be adjusted once you have a chance to understand the dynamics of the business.

Every leader gets a pass to adjust their thinking about objectives in the early learning phase. There are two actions that are not so easily forgiven. The first is failing to deliver against a set objective that has not been adjusted. If you cannot accomplish something, let people know. Don’t let a due date go unaddressed, if it cannot be met.

The second is making incremental adjustments to a target over time, rather than “ripping the bandage off.” Delivering bad news once lets people adjust their thinking. Continually pushing back deadlines or reducing goals smells like incompetence or lack of courage. I’ve seen share prices take precipitous drops as investors lost faith in CEOs who continually made small downward adjustments to guidance.
4. Unforeseen consequences
Hit the target completion dates? Check! Accomplish goals on budget? Check! And yet, while accomplishing this task of great importance, while executing requested change, customer satisfaction suffers, employee turnover increases or your plant operates at full capacity, forcing a lucrative opportunity to go unaddressed. In our zeal to bring about change, it is easy to lose perspective, and it’s hard to ask important questions: Are we doing the right thing? Are there alternative actions that would yield even better results? Are there trade-outs to be recognized that will result from the changes we enact? Or how will this impact people the organization counts on every day?

In summary, a new leader coming from outside the organization is bound to be a source of change, if for no other reason than being ignorant of how things have been done. But usually, the reason you are hired is because of the change you can impact. Care must be taken to get alignment with the people who will help you deliver change, to provide the big picture in your direction and to be flexible enough to communicate the course corrections you have to make. Remember that the urgency of an immediate task needs to be balanced with the longer-term goals that will determine your ultimate success.

5 Hard Lessons for Long Distance Commuters

For a couple decades, I lived the life of a corporate nomad — Washington DC, Kentucky, Connecticut, Toronto, Minnesota… even consideration of a move to Argentina. Before I realized it, the window had closed on what my family would endure. We moved from Minnesota to California, as I took a role leading a marketing organization. We bought a house in Orinda, CA, about as pretty a spot as you can find. We moved in just before the school year started.

From Day 1, the kids were miserable. They missed their friends. They missed their school. The happy life and sense of home they associated with Minnesota were yanked away. We had a buyer for our house, but the sale fell through. I came home from work, and I saw my wife looking at our Minnesota house for sale online, crying. By December, we had bought our old Minnesota house back from the relocation company and had everybody happily home for a Minnesota Christmas.

Then my commute started. I bought a condo in Walnut Creek. I flew to California Monday morning and back to Minnesota Friday afternoon. Made Platinum status on Delta by July each year. I took myself out of succession consideration for the CEO role, because I would not commit to more than a three-year tenure, one lap around a long-term incentive. After 2 ½ years of commuting, my business merged with another company, my position was eliminated and I moved back to Minnesota full-time.

There were lessons learned along the way, lessons I have heard repeated by others whose commutes cover long distances. The pain of failure is a good teacher. So, occasionally, is finding a strategy that works for you or others. Here are five critical considerations:

1. Seriously think about what you’re getting into. This is a higher risk decision than accepting other job offers. Commuting is expensive, financially as well as the toll it takes on your family. You pay for a second residence. You pay for your airfare. You pay for an extra car. Nobody at home is happy with the time you spend with them. Have a very good reason to take a job where commuting is a permanent way of life. And make sure your significant others are aligned with your decision.
2. Strike the right balance. Balancing the requirements of a full-time job with family life is difficult in the best of situations. It is compounded in a remote job. Sometimes, executives work four days in the office and one day at home. That day at home may be a bad compromise. Don’t let home distract your work or work distract your home life. Getting office space outside of your home can help.
3. Listen to your body. I found leaving for work on Monday mornings to be the worst part of the week. It meant an early morning to catch a flight and a fitful night in preparation for the upcoming travel. In hindsight, I don’t think I was doing my family a favor being around on Sunday evening, and Monday afternoon in the office was a physical challenge. For me, leaving on Sunday evening would have been a better call.
4. Consider what your commute says to your employees. Their takeaway might be that you’ve never fully committed to the place where you work or the people you work with. An elevator speech about your situation might help. You love the opportunity this position provides you and how you can contribute. The personal trade-off is that your spouse has a job that is just as important to them, which means you will be living separately during the work week.
5. Put your time alone to good use. Take advantage of time away from home to get embedded in the community where you work. You’re alone and, unlike colleagues who live near work, your time out of the office doesn’t conflict with family activities. Become your company’s representative on local boards or chambers. Not only is it a good use of your time, but it is a demonstration of your interest in the place where your people live.

Given my own experience, execs have sought my advice on taking a position that requires a commute. Most of the time, I counsel against it. It’s tough enough to take on a new assignment of any kind, harder still to have to change cities for work. Commuting can create a permanent state of unsettlement. Still, for the right opportunity, the risk is worth taking. And I have friends who’ve had repeated successful long-distance stints, usually by deploying some or all of these five strategies.

Mia Mulrennan is Chief Talent Officer for Edmentium. Prior to that, she was a consultant focusing on measuring customer-centricity among employees. Her book, Passed Over and Pissed Off, does a great job of addressing the sandwiched Generation X, which often sees leadership opportunities bypassed as Boomers transition directly to Millennials.

I’ve found a more micro application of being passed over and pissed off. Almost every time an executive (let’s call her Rene) finds herself in a new position, there is another person (Lars) who was passed over. Most of the time, there is a Lars who is internally situated. He is respected for his tenure and his institutional knowledge. He is a valuable asset because he knows how to get things done. And often Lars is the biggest management challenge Rene initially faces. The greater Lars’s expectation of getting Rene’s position, the harder this dilemma is.

It is human nature for Lars to view Rene as the manifestation of his own personal failure in not getting the big job. It is a blow to his ego. And it is hard to avoid a skepticism about why the new boss was a better choice. It’s easy to imagine that the decision reflects the tyranny of the unknown, a bias that somebody from the outside is viewed as superior to the more familiar. To make matters worse, Lars seldom gets an explanation for the choice. He shifts into “prove it” mode, judging Rene’s first tentative actions and questioning her motivations in a way that is usually damaging to the new relationship.

Decisions, decisions!
Many new executives will hope there is no problem, or that any attitude problem from Lars improves on its own without making an issue of it. But hope is not a strategy. While Rene will be seen as the organization’s leader, he is perhaps the culture’s key influencer. If Lars undermines Rene, even unintentionally, she has a lot to clean-up among her broader team.

I believe Rene should talk it out with Lars early on. In a one-on-one discussion, she can recognize his value to her and acknowledge that her presence is not the outcome he might have wanted. She must make clear that she is the boss, not a colleague. Rene should clarify the authority and autonomy that Lars is granted. And she must offer him the choice of getting on board as a willing contributor or getting help in an exit.

Lars may deny that an issue exists. In response, Rene can offer evidence she has observed or just point out how normal it is for there to be hurt or resentment and how difficult that can be for the team’s effectiveness.

The honesty of this approach is bound to impact Lars. He begins to realize how his internalizing the situation can affect things beyond himself. The option of an exit may be a shock or a welcome avenue. At a minimum, Rene gains respect from Lars by treating him like a grown-up and for establishing a context that is bigger than either of them.

That tough conversation between Rene and Lars will not be a one-shot deal. Passed over managers who make a commitment to stay usually do so when they have something to call their own. That is where the granting of some authority to Lars is important. Rene probably has bigger performance issues than Lars, however Ronald Reagan’s “Trust but verify” dictum is good advice. Lars will remain Rene’s biggest attitude issue for a while. This can impact the outcomes within his responsibility or it can leach out into the attitudes of the team towards Rene. She must remain vigilant and call out to Lars what she sees.

Denouement
Sometime in our careers, and probably more times than we’d care to count, we have been pissed off about being passed over. But when you are the Rene doing the passing over, it might be easy to forget that there is usually an impacted Lars somewhere on your team. You might wish to avoid the direct personal confrontation with Lars. But there is a much broader constituency of team members who are depending on you getting your relationship with Lars on the right footing.

Leaving the Lars situation unaddressed avoids a face-to-face conflict short term. Long-term, it leads to metastasis. Being Rene requires addressing the situation early and staying vigilant for the longer term. Done correctly, even if you lose a talented lieutenant in the process, you establish your position as a leader, define the values that will guide your work and create the underpinnings for a stronger team.

The bully in your office

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